A Q&A with Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman

Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti are co-authors of The Chairs Are Where The People Go, a compilation of Glouberman’s thoughts, opinions and insights on a variety of topics ranging from Nimbyism to negotiating. The book launches Tuesday, August 2 at La Sala Rossa in Montreal. They will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

Q: Misha, do you think you’d have given different answers if you’d been interviewed by a different person? Does the questioner affect the responder?

Misha: I can’t even imagine what this book would be if I were talking to someone else. I mean, in part: Sheila is a really inquisitive listener – it was one of the very first things I noticed about her when I met her. From the first time we talked – and I think a lot of people have this experience talking to her – I found myself saying things I had not said before, much more often than when I talk to most people. She is very good at eliciting this from people, and it makes her great to talk to.

But more than that: the whole book is Sheila’s idea. It was her idea to come up with a list of everything I know and turn all the items in that list into chapters. That is such a Sheila idea, such a crazy idea. When I responded to that idea, I responded to it as hers, with her sensibilities. I understood, at least a little, what a book of everything I know as imagined by Sheila would look like. The stuff I say in the book isn’t just about me expressing my thoughts; it’s about me talking to her. In some ways, at the same time as it’s a portrait of what’s in my head, I think it’s also a portrait of our friendship. I don’t mean that when Sheila and I hang out, I talk in long chapters and she listens. But I like to think that something specific about how we talk to each other comes through in the book.

Q: Sheila, do you think of this as being your book the way you think of Ticknor or The Middle Stories or How Should a Person Be? as being your book?

Sheila: Misha pointed out the other day that we were successful in never letting the book become “writing,” and it’s true. There was a point when I tried editing the chapters, and I sent a few to Misha, and he didn’t like them. Then I read them over again, and he was right, something was lost. They had moved too far along the spectrum toward my writing, and too far away from his speaking. With books I write alone, the task is really to make myself stop writing, stop editing. With Chairs, the task was more to make myself not start. So I didn’t spend much time fiddling with sentences, and I wasn’t as focussed on making the book an object of beauty, partly because Misha and I have different notions of beauty, and I knew what would be beautiful to me would not be beautiful to Misha. I had to step away from my inclinations a bit. So I would say I think of the book as “ours,” not “mine.” I think something that you share with someone is still yours, but in a different way.

Q: What do noise games have in common with, say, having a relationship or organizing a neighbourhood?

Misha: The noise games I do all have a really strong social component. They’re about playing around with things like leadership or how a group of people makes a decision together.

So for instance, there’s this game in the book that’s about conducting. In that game, people shift through different roles. Sometimes you are the conductor. Sometimes you are being conducted. Sometimes the conductor is conducting one person, sometimes a group. When you play the game, partly you’re just engaging in a sort of musical activity and making sounds. But you’re also engaging in this social experiment. So for instance: you might think that people would prefer to be in the position of power – that everyone would rather conduct than be conducted. But most people can find pleasure in being conducted and in being the conductor. Some people have a bit of a preference, but to the degree to which people do, it’s about evenly split. You also learn quickly that the power of the conductor is not so absolute as it may seem, and that being conducted can also feel a lot like being cared for, like receiving a kind of useful service, as opposed to being bossed around. I there are a lot of analogies there to power in real life.

So with all the games, things happen that are corollaries to what happens in a neighbourhood or in relationships – things about how people make decisions together, about struggles over power, about tolerating disagreement – these things are really present in all the sound games. Still, I hope that when people are playing the games, the social components don’t overshadow the aesthetic components: The games should still be about making interesting sounds.

Sheila, did you ever have the impulse to want to interject your own voice or reply to things that Misha said in the book? How did you deal with having to restrain yourself that way?

Sheila: Early on in the book, when the parameters weren’t totally clear, I would sometimes transcribe my questions or things I said. Other times, Misha would address me directly as “you.” For instance, at one point Misha was talking about how Carl Wilson and I used to have parties at our house every two weeks (in the chapter about how to make friends in a new city). He said “you and Carl.” Then we changed it to “Sheila and Carl,” but it didn’t really make sense for Misha to say “Sheila” when talking to me. It was a bit of a struggle to figure out what to do at those points. Finally, we decided to just cut any reference Misha made to me. It wasn’t about my restraining myself, but figuring out the rules. Every book has rules, and usually they develop as you go.

Q: Misha, how does a book differ from all the other things you do?

Misha: With pretty much everything else I do, I’m in direct contact with the people on the receiving end of it. So when I host Trampoline Hall, the audience is right there in the room with me. The same thing with my music classes or running conferences — I’m really in a direct dialogue with the audience. So it’s really weird to be separated by time and space. It’s weird to me that I say these words and someone who isn’t there at all encounters them, or that they encounter them years after I said them. I’m still trying to make sense of it; to learn how to do it. It’s not something that feels very natural to me.

Q: Sheila, do you ever think you’ll write a book the “traditional” way again?

Sheila: Oh yes, absolutely. I’m interested in writing in all sorts of ways. Writing in “my” voice or writing in the voice of a character from history, like I did in my novel Ticknor, or writing in Misha’s voice – it’s all just writing and it’s all very interesting to me. I don’t only care about exploring my own thoughts and feelings. I’m just as interested (often even more interested) in the thoughts and feelings of other people. So although I’m in this body, I don’t feel obliged to restrict myself only to the words that come from it. Some writers speak of writing as an experience of taking dictation from a muse or a Spirit. I think there are muses and Spirits everywhere, and it might a friend.